Labour

The combined effect of structural adjustment programmes, increased capital mobility and the globalisation of production has resulted in mass job losses and precarious employment in many countries over the past 30 years. Attacks on social welfare, healthcare and education, as well as privatisations, high unemployment and strong arm tactics against trade union organising, have rolled back many of the hard-won fruits of struggle. In the name of global competitiveness, workers are set against each other in a race to the bottom which only the bosses can win.

International free trade and investment agreements are an important vehicle for the transfer of power from labour to capital. As transnational corporations are granted ever greater rights to trade and invest across the global economy, workers are increasingly cast as commodities in global value chains over which they have no control. The transnational capitalist elites that sit on top of these global networks of production can freely switch suppliers in search of lower labour costs or higher productivity, leaving behind a social devastation from which successive generations are often unable to recover.

The new generation of twenty-first century FTAs are now seeking to intensify this imbalance still further by removing the social standards and market regulations that have traditionally served to limit the power of transnational capital. The elimination of these regulatory ‘barriers’ to trade forms a central pillar of the most recent wave of FTAs, through which transnational corporations will be freed from any restrictions which might have allowed labour to participate in the benefits of trade or investment. Workers will create the wealth, and corporate elites will accumulate it.

One strategy previously advocated by trade unions in the global North was to press for social chapters in FTAs as a means of mitigating the worst effects of market liberalisation. This strategy is now widely recognised as ineffective, since such measures could never compensate for the devastation caused by bringing domestic enterprises into unequal competition with transnational corporations. The record of deindustrialisation and mass unemployment in the wake of trade liberalisations imposed on the peoples of Africa and Latin America shows just how high a price workers have paid for such policies. The negative experiences of US, Canadian and Mexican workers as a result of NAFTA are a reminder that workers in richer countries are also vulnerable.

Trade unions in the global South have long played an important role in mass movements of resistance to free trade and investment agreements. In Korea, many thousands of KCTU members participated in national mobilisations against both the US-Korea and EU-Korea FTAs. Workers in Central America actively opposed CAFTA, such as those from the state power and telecommunications sector in Costa Rica and education workers in Guatemala. Now Northern trade unions are joining these movements of resistance: all major European trade union federations have come out against CETA and TTIP, for example, just as the AFL-CIO called for a halt to the TPP negotiations for fear of the impact on US workers. The global union federation PSI has also spoken out against service liberalisation agreements such as TiSA, which threaten to undermine public services and public sector jobs alike.

Migrant workers’ associations have also formed part of the movement against FTAs. Free trade and investment agreements have resulted in social dislocations that have forced people from their farms, jobs, families and communities into exploitation as migrant workers, either internally within their own states or in other countries. At the same time, the growing number of FTAs that include provisions on temporary labour mobility have been condemned for endangering workers still further, driving people to migrate while still denying them basic rights in countries where their presence is highly precarious and often used by employers to undermine existing labour standards still further. Only when workers are no longer relegated to the status of commodities serving the economic strategies of capitalist elites can there be any hope of their liberation from such exploitation.

Contributed by John Hilary, War on Want

last update: December 2015

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Global trade union leaders meeting in Panama have united in condemnation of TiSA (the Trade in Services Agreement) and CETA (the Comprehensive Economic & Trade Agreement), highlighting the risks that both trade agreements pose to jobs and job security.

US unions might use the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, which includes a clause designed to protect labor rights, to assist their Korean allies striking against government “reform” proposals that would make it easier for employers to fire workers, weaken seniority protections won through collective bargaining and privatize some state-owned industries.

For decades, labour has been fighting purely defensive battles against the neo-liberal trade and investment agenda; we lack an agenda of our own. Lost ground will not be reclaimed on what is fundamentally hostile territory, argues Peter Rossmann of the IUF.

The Philippine government is hoping the EU-Philippines FTA wil facilitate more tuna exports to the EU, but the industry is riddled with issues of low wages, unfair labor practices, poor and slave-like working conditions.

Colombia has failed to enforce worker protections in a free trade agreement with the United States, U.S. and Colombian labor unions said, raising questions about similar provisions in the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

When Guatemala joined CAFTA in 2006, proponents of the deal said it would improve conditions for workers. Seven years later, Guatemala was named the most dangerous country for trade unionists. Supporters of the TPP are making many of the same promises.

The Obama administration promotes the TPP as “the most progressive trade bill in history,” with the highest labor standards yet but similar promises have been trotted out to justify every free-trade agreement from NAFTA on.

Government of Malaysia has proposed several amendments be made to the Sabah Labour Ordinance, the Industrial Relations Act and Workers’ Union Act to allow TPPA to materialise but labour groups are opposed to such measures.

Unions such as Unite and the United Steelworkers in the US and Canada have warned that their hard fought for and cherished social, employment rights and sectoral collective bargaining system may be undermined by new trade deals.

Shrouded with secrecy and posing a threat to public services, Owen Tudor tells EurActiv why the UK Trade Union Congress doesn’t believe the hype over TTIP, and why exploitation, rather than immigration, should be the cause of people’s concerns.

The Korean government is planning to carry out a study on the import of professional manpower such as consultants, engineers and lawyers and its impact on the domestic job market, as the issue is emerging in FTA negotiations across the world,

With Canada’s labour movement searching for alternative economic models for a post-crisis, climatically unstable world, the government’s new trade and investment pacts are barriers to a better future and must be resisted.

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